A Very Sick Culture

A few things I ran across today remind me that we have diverged very, very far from anything approaching rationality.

"I've always though that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste."

A blurb about the movie Crude reminded me that this mother fucker was almost made Obama's Treasury Secretary.

"My message on this topic is clear and direct. We are at a crucial moment in human history. 2009 is to climate change what 1939 was to WWII. Poland has been invaded – the Arctic is melting, the bushfires are burning, the droughts are strengthening and the floods are sweeping away communities. There is only one question you have to ask yourself: “what will I tell my children?”

This article is right on point. We have already passed the climate tipping point; the question now is whether we will merely precipitate a massive shift in the Earth's climate, or whether we will cause the extinction of most complex multicellular life.

By 2100, perhaps half of the planet will have entirely new climates to which no current species on Earth are adapted. We don't have to go down this road. We can stop digging up coal, sucking oil out of the Alberta tar sands, and develop a sane energy policy which produces less toxicity and less greenhouse gasses.

But the people in charge are virulently opposed to this, because it they fear any change which might result in a loss of power or wealth for them. They are the same class of people who took all the land, and killed our native forebears ... they killed the ones ones who dared to fight back, or be born free from indoctrination.

They sold the land back to the broken, the afflicted, and to those who did not fight back. They sold the land back with conditions attached, with a price -- make the land productive. Make a profit. Or else we take the and back and leave you cold and destitute, lying in the gutter.

The Rockafellers, Fords and Carnegies of this world have already taken our pride, the fruits of our labor, and most of our self-respect. They have divorced us from the price of a job well done. They found a way to make even more profit by taking the land back from our ancestors, finding them new and better places to work called factories. Very efficient! Coal smoke is good for you! Our 50 page book of regulations will make the workplace more fair! It was far cheaper to work a man (or a woman, they're not picky) for bare subsistence wages -- then profit anew from their rent, heat, car, food and medical bills.

The Union Carbides, Dow Chemicals and Monsantos of this world have already come for large portions of our lives. We live in a toxic stew of carcinogens, mutagens and neurotoxins. We eat carcinogens, mutagens and neurotoxins. We drink carcinogens, mutagens and neurotoxins ... with a dash of prozac, birth control hormones, and all the other drugs that wash into the sewers and find their way back into our drinking water. They kill us quickly, sometimes. Sometimes they kill us slowly. Most often of all, they simply make us suffer from unexplained illnesses that are caused by (or exacerbated by) the toxins they produce in enormous quantities.

And now their conglomerated power comes for the lives of generations to come. There is great profit to be had! And so they lie, they trick, they deceive. The blood of the trickster god Loki flows in their veins. They are wounding the planet's air, water and land in a staggering display of hubris. They are destroying the ability of this planet to nurture the complex web of life that sustains all living things.

Do we listen?

Do we accept the creature comforts they throw at us
listen to their lies
and accept that the Earth is simply too big to worry about?

There is no attic to hide in
we cannot ride out the coming storm

If no one stands up for us
if we do not stand up for ourselves
then there will be no generations left to curse our names.

Despite this chorus of anger, I am left inspired by another author, who writes:

"The situation is so immense, so mind-numbingly complex and difficult, so lost in the labyrinth of humanity’s perverse perceptions, that I’ve now moved beyond any notion of being “optimistic” or “pessimistic”. I will simply continue to fight as creatively and as hard as I can, and hope that my own perception is wrong."

In this sense, Derrick Jensen is quite correct. We are indeed at the "endgame". 10,000 years of cultural domination by the food hoarders, money lenders and lawgivers of this world have brought us to the precipice.

What do we do about it? I don't know.

But like most things in life, imperfect action beats sitting on your butt trying to come up with "the perfect plan".